4 Are Killed As Storms Lash The Northeast

By FRANK BRUNI

Published: September 8, 1998

Punishing thunderstorms and brutal hurricane-force winds wrought destruction across a broad area of upstate New York and around New York City yesterday, battering houses, toppling power lines, capsizing boats and causing at least three deaths.

In the Bronx, a 19-year-old woman was killed when high winds sent a tree branch crashing down on her head as she attended a Labor Day barbecue in the courtyard of a housing project, the authorities said.

Housing Authority officers at the Edenwald Houses, on East 229th Street at Baychester Avenue, said the woman, whom officials identified as Iesamama Neal, was sitting at a concrete chess table with her 2-year-old brother when the branch fell.

''She was able to push the 2-year-old under the table, which saved him,'' said Rosa N. Morales, the first Housing Authority officer to arrive on the scene.

Earlier, two men were killed on the grounds of the New York State Fair near Syracuse shortly after 1 A.M., when winds gusting more than 75 miles an hour ripped the roofs from several buildings and branches from trees and hurled the debris on top of the structures in which the men were sleeping, State Police and fair officials said.

And in Sandy Hook Bay off the coast of New Jersey, a 56-year-old man drowned after his 14-foot fishing boat capsized in gale-force winds about 4 P.M., said the police, who would not release the man's name until his family was notified. Sgt. Tim Fogarty of the New Jersey State Police said another man on the boat swam to safety.

Elsewhere around the city and state, the storms disrupted the Labor Day holiday in ways large and small, life-threatening and pleasure-spoiling.

Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses lost power; in the Syracuse and Rochester areas, utility company officials said electricity might not be restored to some customers for as long as a week. Fallen trees left many upstate roads impassable, and fallen power lines rendered them perilous, prompting several counties, cities and towns to prohibit any traffic other than emergency vehicles and repair crews.

In the New York City area, sudden torrential downpours between 2 P.M. and 4 P.M. sent spectators at the United States Open tennis tournament in Flushing, Queens, and at the West Indian American Day Carnival parade in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, scurrying for shelter. And the rains and winds stranded some boaters off the coasts of Long Island and New Jersey, forcing the United States Coast Guard to conduct water and air rescues.

National Weather Service officials said that although the storm systems that hit different areas of New York State were not identical, they were born of the same conditions: the violent collision of a late-summer heat wave with the leading edge of a cold front.

Although people reported tornadoes in Syracuse, at Bethpage and Great Neck on Long Island and in Rahway, N.J., the National Weather Service officials said last evening that they could not definitively confirm that tornadoes had touched down in those spots.

Some of the people caught in the storms, which in some areas included rapid-fire lightning and balls of hail, said they had seldom seen anything like it.

''We're in a state of disbelief,'' said Terry Kennedy of Dewitt, a suburb of Syracuse. One tree had crashed into his roof, another had flattened his daughter's car, and yet another had ended up in a neighbor's swimming pool. But Mr. Kennedy, his wife and their children expressed something akin to relief. ''Everybody's happy that we're alive,'' Mr. Kennedy said.

The Syracuse and Rochester areas were perhaps the hardest hit. Gov. George E. Pataki declared nine counties in that region to be in a state of emergency, which meant that the state would provide financial and other resources to those counties if help was requested.

Dennis Michalski, a spokesman for the New York State Emergency Management Office, estimated that 300,000 residences along a band between Buffalo and Albany had lost electricity. Utility company officials said that some might not regain power for many days.

Scores of people had to seek refuge at temporary shelters because of damage to their homes, and signs of property destruction were abundant in and around Syracuse, where a prominent Catholic church, St. Lucy's in the downtown part of the city, lost one of its steeples.

The New York State Fair, which was supposed to be open for its 12th and last day yesterday, had to remain closed because of damage.

Officials of utility companies said that some 19,500 customers in the city and Westchester County were without power as of midnight, along with roughly 71,500 on Long Island; 77,000 in New Jersey, and 10,000 in southern Connecticut.

Mr. Michalski said that in addition to the deaths of John Perry, 43, of Silver Creek, and Beryl Stone, 61, of Central Square, at the fairgrounds, more than a dozen upstate residents were injured, though none critically.

There were additional reports of people with storm-related injuries around New York City, including a man who was trapped in the winds while parasailing on Barnegat Bay at the New Jersey Shore. Local law enforcement officials did not identify him but said he had fractured his skull and was in guarded condition at Atlantic City Medical Center.

Damage was particularly heavy in Union County, where the towns of Plainfield, Cranford, Clark and Rahway declared a state of emergency, imposed overnight curfews and postponed the opening day of school. ''It's the worst storm I've seen in 25 years,'' said Lieut. Andrew Ross, coordinator of emergency management in Rahway, where 90 percent of the town remained without power as of midnight.

In the skies over New York and New Jersey, a six-person air-sea rescue team from the Police Department's Aviation Unit, based at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, responded to one distress call after another. About 5:20 A.M., police divers rescued a New Jersey man who had been adrift in the Atlantic Ocean for two and a half hours after his sailboat sank.

Jeffrey Kasoff, 43, of Summit, said he was sailing from Atlantic Beach, N.Y., to his Perth Amboy yacht club yesterday afternoon when a line squall with winds up to 60 miles per hour knocked his 36-foot ketch on its side. In a telephone interview, Mr. Kasoff said that as water filled his boat, the Dragonfly, he was forced to jump overboard.

A police helicopter pilot, Officer Patrick Walsh, spotted Mr. Kasoff after receiving a distress call from a tugboat captain. As the helicopter hovered a few feet overhead, the team's two divers, Officers Chris Balou and Keith Duval, jumped into the sea and helped Mr. Kasoff into a rescue basket. ''It was pretty nice to see them,'' Mr. Kasoff said.

Photos: State troopers passed the wreckage of a section of the New York State Fair Grounds in Geddes, N.Y., near Syracuse, where two men were killed. (Michael Okoniewski for The New York Times); Below, waiting out the heavy rain beneath a construction shelter at Broadway and West 58th Street. (Librado Romero/The New York Times)